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Division Spotlight
Fuel Cycle & Waste Management
Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
Meeting Spotlight
International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering (M&C 2025)
April 27–30, 2025
Denver, CO|The Westin Denver Downtown
Standards Program
The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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Industry Update—May 2025
Here is a recap of industry happenings from the recent past:
TerraPower’s Natrium reactor advances on several fronts
TerraPower has continued making aggressive progress in several areas for its under-construction Natrium Reactor Demonstration Project since the beginning of the year. Natrium is an advanced 345-MWe reactor that has liquid sodium as a coolant, improved fuel utilization, enhanced safety features, and an integrated energy storage system, allowing for a brief power output boost to 500-MWe if needed for grid resiliency. The company broke ground for its first Natrium plant in 2024 near a retiring coal plant in Kemmerer, Wyo.
George H. Miley, S. C. Hu, V. Varadarajan
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 18 | Number 4 | December 1990 | Pages 633-640
Alpha Particles in Fusion Research | doi.org/10.13182/FST90-A29256
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Alpha-particle ash accumulation in tokamaks and two possible ash control techniques are discussed. The effect of thermal alpha-particle ash accumulation on plasma performance is examined using a zero-dimensional analysis with profile corrections. Alpha-particle accumulation is shown to have serious effects on ignition requirements. An analytical model developed to predict the effect of sawtooth disruption on ash accumulation is discussed. The analytical results indicate that the sawtooth is effective when the temperature profile is parabolic or flatter. Alpha-particle ejection by a fishbone oscillation is envisaged to be helpful in ash control, and a model of the physics in a large-aspect-ratio approximation is discussed using an extended version of a Chen et al. formalism. The trapped particle destabilization of the internal kinks due to the alpha particles and a second hot-particle species is considered, and the expected oscillation frequency and growth rates are derived.